Happy Accidents

Sometimes accidents turn out to be happy ones.

This seems especially true with creative projects of all kinds. There are plenty of stories of people trying to write songs and ending up with penicillin by accident. Okay, maybe not plenty and maybe nothing like that has ever happened but sometimes what seems like a bad situation can morph into an entirely unexpected good one.

You probably think I’m about to go deep with this concept but alas, no. I’m just going to talk about frosting. Specifically, mocha buttercream frosting.

Last year a friend came out to visit and was joined by several members of her extended family for a big reunion/birthday celebration. She (very generously, I might add) commissioned three cakes from me for the big event—one for each of the two birthdays being celebrated and one big one for the whole family. We agreed on the themes for the two smaller birthday cakes fairly quickly but it was more difficult to come up with something that would work for the whole group. Everyone liked chocolate but not too much chocolate, there were some nut allergies, some dislike of fruit flavors, and we needed something fun for the kids. I was still unsure of the final design—though I had a few of the elements—up until the day before when I decided to make the frosting at least and hoped the rest would come to me. I’d decided to go with a two-tiered chocolate cake with a mocha buttercream (why mocha buttercream, I still don’t know, but it seemed like it would balance out the chocolate a bit) and since mocha buttercream was not one of my specialties, I searched around for a recipe that sounded good. By the way, untried recipe before a big event/dinner party/etc.? Very. Bad. Idea.

Imagine my dismay when I made the recipe and the buttercream, which was supposed to be “smooth, whipped, and dreamy” looked grainy, wet, and nightmarish. I had made a large amount of it and it was too late to start over. I tasted it. Delicious. But what to do about the look of it. I stuck it in the fridge hoping it would firm up and smooth out when it got a bit cooler and worked on the other elements of the cake—some chocolate shells and homemade lollipops. But when I reached back in for it, I saw that the buttercream, while firmer, had become even grainier looking and was flecked with espresso and cocoa. It looked, in fact, very much like…sand.

Hmm. Sand. Family reunion. Beautiful Del Mar. And so the Back to the Beach Cake was born—a big sandcastle of a cake with shells, scattered brown sugar sand and golden lollipop suns on top.  Despite the fact that everyone liked the cake and that the buttercream was actually the best part (not too sweet and with a complex, rich flavor), I was so rattled by the experience that I put the recipe away and didn’t even think about using it again. Until yesterday.

Yesterday another friend came to visit this beautiful paradise where I live and to welcome him I decided to make a much smaller version of the same cake. This time I halved the recipe but made it exactly the same way. As I was preparing it, the thought did occur to me that this time it would turn out to be smooth and dreamy and nothing at all like what I was going for.

But although the buttercream looked decidedly creamy right after I made it, a few hours in the fridge got it back to the sandy look I was going for (it was still buttery and smooth on the tongue). After the addition of a chocolate starfish and chocolate shells that I made (and some Cadbury Flake "driftwood"), it was done.
A happy accident. A tasty cake. 

Oh, It's August

Oh dear. I see it has been over a month since my last blog post. So long, in fact, that I appear to have completely missed the entire month of July.

This was not planned, alas. The forced hiatus was something I worried about when I began writing the blog but I knew it would happen eventually. To be honest, it’s been such a swirl of activity around here that I don’t even know what I’ve been doing. Working. Plenty of that. Baking. Quite a bit of that as well—a birthday cake for my dad, Cuban pastries called “Refugiados” that required the scouring of two counties to find guava paste, and a birthday cake for my son that involved creating a scene from Fantasia out of sugar and fondant to name just a few. I recorded a song with professional musicians. I also managed to crack a tooth in half and then had to have it extracted. That was painful. So it was a busy month—suffused with I’m-not-updating-my-blog guilt which kept building until it hardened into a sort of paralysis. But here it is, August 1, and well past time to post. Fortunately, I have just the thing and it involves neither teeth nor cake. Today I want to discuss a couple of books (books!), both of which have been self-published and deserve, in my humble opinion, an audience. I’ll provide links to their Amazon pages here because, well, that’s where you can find them.

The first is Westof Babylon by Ted Heller. The book first came to my attention because of this article in The Guardian about the challenges Heller faced getting his novel published. It was a good piece, I thought, and the book sounded intriguing and especially appealing to me, who considers rock and roll bios/memoirs/novels one of my most pleasurable guilty pleasures. I’ve read many excellent rock and roll memoirs and bios but have yet to find a rock and roll novel that can do the trick. This is a tough thing to write about in novel form because one of the key components of a rock and roll book is the music. Even if one isn’t familiar with the band, the songs or music being described can be accessed and listened to. That soundtrack is essential to a good rock and roll story. I read the hilarious interview Heller did with himself here and some of the reviews of the novel and I was sold. So I bought a copy and started reading.

I love this novel.

The story follows the lives of four members of a rock band—The Furious Overfalls—who, once at the top of the charts, are now in their late fifties and still plugging away; juggling aches and pains, existential crises, families, and a growing sense of futility as they continue to tour. There is plenty of irony and humor here leavened with honest emotion but there is no cheap sentiment in sight. What I love most about it, though, is that Heller nailed the hardest part—getting the “music” right. The Furious Overfalls don’t exist, but they certainly could. By describing the kinds of songs they sing, the musical influences that shaped them, and the shifting currents of pop culture surrounding them, Heller manages to create a soundtrack for the reader. A groove if you will. But even without that it’s a great story. And it’s well written. I’d never have known it existed had someone not posted that link to The Guardian story on Facebook, which sends me into a mild panic wondering about what else I’ve missed and will miss and might have missed and whether or not the ever-changing landscape of publishing will ever settle into some kind of recognizable form. Too many questions. The best answer, perhaps, is just to keep reading.

I’m much more closely associated with the second book I want to recommend, Death NeverSleeps by E.J. Simon. Full disclosure: this is a novel I edited for the author and one I saw develop over several drafts as he worked on it. I have worked with many authors, all of whom put heart and soul into their projects, but Simon is surely one of the hardest working when it comes to putting in the sheer hours it takes to hone and re-hone a manuscript. From the start, I loved the idea behind Death Never Sleeps, which gives an unusual and original twist to a traditional crime thriller. It’s the tale of two brothers, Alex and Michael Nicholas, both of whom run successful businesses, one of which happens to be illegal. When Alex is murdered, Michael must attend to his affairs and finds that the world of gangsters and thugs is much closer to his own corporate boardroom than he knew. And as it turns out, Alex has left behind a virtual version of himself in the form of an artificially intelligent avatar that becomes “smarter” as it/he is fed more information. It’s a clever premise and Simon executes it well. There is humor here as well—often in places where you least expect it—and it moves fast. (An excellent beach read if, unlike me who lives two miles from the ocean, you get to the beach at all this summer.) More importantly, though, this novel is an entertaining read. And though I can’t be considered objective on this one, I believe that Simon’s dedication to and simple joy in the process of writing this novel comes through on every page.

So happy August, everyone. Soon, a return to our regularly scheduled cakes and things.